Designing a circular carbon and plastics economy for a sustainable future.

The linear production and consumption of plastics today is unsustainable. It creates large amounts of unnecessary and mismanaged waste, pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, undermining global climate targets and the Sustainable Development Goals. This Perspective provides an integrated technological, economic and legal view on how to deliver a circular carbon and plastics economy that minimizes carbon dioxide emissions. Different pathways that maximize recirculation of carbon (dioxide) between plastics waste and feedstocks are outlined, including mechanical, chemical and biological recycling, and those involving the use of biomass and carbon dioxide. Four future scenarios are described, only one of which achieves sufficient greenhouse gas savings in line with global climate targets. Such a bold system change requires 50% reduction in future plastic demand, complete phase-out of fossil-derived plastics, 95% recycling rates of retrievable plastics and use of renewable energy. It is hard to overstate the challenge of achieving this goal. We therefore present a roadmap outlining the scale and timing of the economic and legal interventions that could possibly support this. Assessing the service lifespan and recoverability of plastic products, along with considerations of sufficiency and smart design, can moreover provide design principles to guide future manufacturing, use and disposal of plastics.

Tropical forests are approaching critical temperature thresholds.

The critical temperature beyond which photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail averages approximately 46.7 °C (Tcrit)1. However, it remains unclear whether leaf temperatures experienced by tropical vegetation approach this threshold or soon will under climate change. Here we found that pantropical canopy temperatures independently triangulated from individual leaf thermocouples, pyrgeometers and remote sensing (ECOSTRESS) have midday peak temperatures of approximately 34 °C during dry periods, with a long high-temperature tail that can exceed 40 °C. Leaf thermocouple data from multiple sites across the tropics suggest that even within pixels of moderate temperatures, upper canopy leaves exceed Tcrit 0.01% of the time. Furthermore, upper canopy leaf warming experiments (+2, 3 and 4 °C in Brazil, Puerto Rico and Australia, respectively) increased leaf temperatures non-linearly, with peak leaf temperatures exceeding Tcrit 1.3% of the time (11% for more than 43.5 °C, and 0.3% for more than 49.9 °C). Using an empirical model incorporating these dynamics (validated with warming experiment data), we found that tropical forests can withstand up to a 3.9 ± 0.5 °C increase in air temperatures before a potential tipping point in metabolic function, but remaining uncertainty in the plasticity and range of Tcrit in tropical trees and the effect of leaf death on tree death could drastically change this prediction. The 4.0 °C estimate is within the 'worst-case scenario' (representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5) of climate change predictions2 for tropical forests and therefore it is still within our power to decide (for example, by not taking the RCP 6.0 or 8.5 route) the fate of these critical realms of carbon, water and biodiversity3,4.

Does the implementation of green finance regulation promote the high-quality development of enterprises? Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China.

The improvement of enterprise total factor productivity and labor productivity is the micro-embodiment of high-quality economic development. Green finance relies on the dual functions of resource allocation and environmental regulation to guide enterprises to adjust their mode of operation through incentive and restraint mechanisms, attach importance to energy conservation and environmental protection, and guide enterprises to develop with high quality. Taking the construction of the green financial supervision system in 2016 as a quasi-natural experiment, we constructed a difference-in-difference model to investigate the impact and mechanism of green finance on the high-quality development of enterprises, based on the panel data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2006 to 2020. The results show that the implementation of green finance effectively promotes the high-quality development of enterprises. This promotion effect is heterogeneous from perspectives of enterprise-specific characteristics, executive education background, and environmental regulation intensity. The influence mechanisms mainly rely on tightening financial constraints, upgrading the level of green technology innovation, and improving the quality of internal control. These findings provide an important decision-making reference for better implementing green finance policies and promoting high-quality economic development under the green and low-carbon concept and carbon peak carbon neutrality goals.

The impact of green taxes on green innovation of enterprises: a quasi-natural experiment based on the levy of environmental protection taxes.

Green innovation is a strategic choice for Chinese enterprises to achieve in balancing economic performance and environmental benefits. Environmental protection tax (EPT) is the first green tax in China. How to fully leverage the institutional dividends of environmental tax reform to achieve green innovation in enterprises is of great significance for the high-quality development of China's current economy. This study takes the levy of environmental protection taxes as the quasi-natural experiment and uses DID, DDD, PSM-DID and so on to verify the impact of EPT on green innovation. The results show that EPT can improve green innovation through the path of legitimacy pressure and legitimacy management. Notably, the effects are more obvious in enterprises with non-state-owned, low-financing constraints and located in the eastern region. Furthermore, green innovations under the push of environmental protection tax can improve long-term performance, while it has a negative effect on short-term performance. The levy of EPT has the dual dividend effect of economy and environment. Moreover, this study explores the source of the legitimacy pressure and the strategic response of enterprises and provides guidance for government's precise implementation of policies to optimize the role of EPT in green innovation.

Digital finance and regional green innovation: the perspective of environmental regulation.

The relationship between digital finance and regional green innovation has been partially confirmed, yet the role of environmental regulation in it remains unexplored. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of digital finance on regional green innovation and tests the moderating role of environmental regulation using Chinese city-level data from 2011 to 2019 as a research sample. The results show that digital finance can significantly promote regional green innovation by alleviating regional financing constraints and increasing regional R&D investment. Besides, digital finance has apparent regional difference effects (the contribution of digital finance to regional green innovation is greater in eastern China than in western China, and the development of digital finance in neighbouring regions has a negative transmission effect on local green innovation). Finally, environmental regulation positively moderates the relationship between digital finance and regional green innovation. This paper explores the relationship between digital finance and regional green innovation from the perspective of environmental regulation, providing empirical evidence to promote regional green innovation.

Sustainability, Collective Self-Regulation, and Human-Nature Interdependence.

Like any organism, humanity constructs its niche and adapts to the rest of nature by modifying available materials around them. In the era that some have dubbed the "Anthropocene," human niche construction has gone so far as to threaten the planetary climate system. The central question of sustainability is how humanity can collectively self-regulate niche construction, that is, humanity's relationship with the rest of nature. In this article, we argue that to resolve the collective self-regulation problem for sustainability, sufficiently accurate and relevant aspects of causal knowledge about the functioning of complex social-ecological systems need to be cognized, communicated, and collectively shared. More specifically, causal knowledge about human-nature interdependence-how humans interact with each other and the rest of nature-is critical for coordinating cognitive agents' thoughts, feelings, and actions for the greater good without falling into the trap of free riding. Here, we will develop a theoretical framework to consider the role of causal knowledge about human-nature interdependence in collective self-regulation for sustainability, review the relevant empirical research primarily focusing on climate change, and take stock of what is currently known and what we need to investigate in the future.

The impact of bank's engagement in shadow banking activities on bank's sustainability: Evidence from Chinese commercial banks.

The economic and environmental consequences of bad banking practices have aroused much attention. In China, banks are at the center of shadow banking activities through which they avoid regulation and support environmentally unfriendly businesses such as fossil fuel companies and other high-pollution enterprises. In this paper, we study the impact of bank's engagement in shadow banking activities on its sustainability by using annual panel data of Chinese commercial banks. The result shows that bank's engagement in shadow banking activities has a negative impact on its sustainability and the negative impact of bank's engagement in shadow banking activities is more pronounced for city commercial banks and unlisted banks which are less regulated and lack corporate social responsibility (CSR). Furthermore, we explore the underlying mechanism of our findings and prove that bank's sustainability is impeded because it transforms high-risk loan into shadow banking activities which are less regulated. Finally, by using difference-in-difference (DiD) approach, we find that bank's sustainability improved after the financial regulation on shadow banking activities. Our research provides empirical evidence that the financial regulation on bad banking practices is beneficial for bank's sustainability.